Biological materials are sourced and used throughout developed and developing countries for consumption, as home remedies, and in drug products. Examples include plant materials such as herbs (e.g., parsley) and spices (e.g., cinnamon) and animal materials such as meat and fish. Accordingly, there is a large and distributed global market for certain materials. The materials are typically pre-processed at their sources before distribution to suppliers, manufacturers, retailers, or consumers. For example, plant and animal material may be fresh, dried, cooked, whole, chopped, minced, ground, etc.
Attributes such as the color, size, shape and texture of the material may vary depending upon the genetics of the individual species and the natural conditions when and where the plant material is grown or animal is raised. Examples include the geographic region for cultivation, soil composition, water quality, weather conditions including temperature and humidity, sunshine intensity, and growth period. In another example, material may be contaminated with hazardous impurities such as animal fecal matter, contaminants such as rocks and sticks, or adulterated with fillers such as rice or soy powder.
As a result, intermediaries in a distribution chain of commerce seek to ascertain the attributes (e.g., authenticity, purity, quality) of materials. In conventional techniques, the attributes of materials are subjectively judged based on a skilled person's experience by observing the shape and color of a sample, in smelling flavor and/or via chewing material. As a result, conventional techniques are unreliable and inconsistent because people are not uniformly trained to evaluate diverse materials.
Existing systems that can provide reliable and consistent results involve complex and cost-prohibitive machinery operated by highly-skilled technicians. Those systems that can reliably test quality and authenticity at the chemical or genetic level to determine purity and contaminants are non-portable and are implemented in a few scientific laboratories or at manufacturing facilities. Mobile diagnostic testing systems can rely on expensive optical sensors and equipment (e.g. FTIR and NIR spectrophotometers), require adherence of costly and destructive optical signatures to materials, and require technical experts to develop databases and to operate. As a result, reliable, affordable, and mobile techniques are unavailable to laypeople. Consequently, for example, herbs sourced in developing countries and shipped to the U.S. may not have been reliably tested for quality or authenticity due to a lack of affordable methods. Accordingly, a need exists for a cost-effective and scalable technique for ascertaining attributes of certain materials and without trained experts.